Someone hacked Anderson Cooper’s Twitter account and called Trump a “pathetic loser”
President Donald Trump’s notorious tweets can incite outrage and disbelief in the best of us. And for a moment on December 13th, it seemed that Trump had pushed a CNN news anchor over the edge when Anderson Cooper’s Twitter account was hacked.
Following Doug Jones’ victory in the Alabama Senate election, Trump, a vocal Moore supporter, tweeted that he had known all along Moore would lose.
"The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up!), is that I said Roy Moore would not be able to win the general election. I was right!" Trump wrote.
Cooper’s account clapped back.
"Oh really? You endorsed him you tool! Pathetic loser," Cooper's account tweeted on December 13th.
The tweet was liked about 16,000 times and got about 2,700 retweets in the time it was live. Cooper discovered the tweet after about an hour and promptly deleted it. The news anchor has more than 9.8 million Twitter followers.
CNN Communications tweeted that Cooper’s account had been hacked. Cooper himself weighed in on the issue, saying that he had been asleep at the time and hadn’t tweeted anything in days.
This morning someone gained access to the handle @andersoncooper and replied to POTUS. We're working with Twitter to secure the account.
— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) December 13, 2017
just woke up to find out someone gained access to my twitter account. i have not sent a tweet in days or replied to any tweets. We are looking into how this happened.
— Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper) December 13, 2017
— Rose DiValerio (@TheRealRoseDiV) December 13, 2017
Cooper hosts the show Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN. On the show, Cooper frequently gives his take on politics and news, including Trump’s performance as president. During the 2016 presidential election, he hosted a debate between then-candidates Trump and Hillary Clinton, in which Trump infamously referred to illegal immigrants as “bad hombres.”
Cooper has been critical of Trump and his supporters in the past, although his hacker took it a step further. Earlier this year, Cooper apologized on Twitter after he made an on-air comment that one of Trump’s supporters would defend him even “if he took a dump on his desk.” But while this criticism was crude, Cooper has avoided calling the president names like his hacker did.
Hacking someone else’s social media account is a major breach of privacy. While the hack of Cooper’s Twitter account seems lighthearted, hopefully Cooper will be able to regain access to his account — and his words — soon.